Biotech Values

[AlpineBV_Miller]

From the Tweet I did April 29:

$DNDN $JNJ and $SNY drugs extend median M+ CRPC #prostate pts life from ~18mo in 2003 to ~32mo in 2011, a 78% increase.

It is not in the industry's interest to come up with a cure- the ramifications would be disastrous for research departments , a lot of companies being closed etc

You are overly cynical about biotech entrepreneurs. If they found the cure they'd be the happiest person in the world. The economics would take care of themselves because while the prevalence would go to zero, the incidence refreshes every year.

if you had to administer an insurance pool the pays claims - would you still take that same position? if limited resources existed?

Limited resources do exist. Most of the political conversation on healthcare in America the last two years has been around how to deal with those limited resources. And yes, I'd still want a cure if I was running an insurance pool.

The same equivalent attitude took place in the real estate industry - where a lot of people made bets and countless of bystanders got hurt first by lower real estate values and second by loosing their jobs and their homes - innocent bystanders.

You overstate this, too. There were very few innocent bystanders in the real estate market collapse -- no more as a percentage of homeowners than at any other time. Most people didn't factor in economic risk and inflation when making the decision on having a house. They never asked themselves, "What if gasoline goes to $4/gal? Can I afford to make the 60-minute commute from the house I want to buy?" I still feel sorry for many folks, but they aren't blameless. Even (especially) those of us laregely untouched by the recession who saw what was happening in the commodities market, derivatives markets, and etc. early enough to make smart financial decisions. We should have been much more insistent about reforms. Maybe if we would have, it would have been quite so bad or quite so expensive.

But all that's off topic for this Board, so...